The End of the Rawlsian Atlantic?

For Europeans, when not seen as a Cold War hangover, Atlanticism has been associated with radical centrism. One of the characteristics of Third Way politics in the Labour Party, for example, was an ambition to model Labour on the Democrats in the US. Radical centrism has almost disappeared from political life and so it is tempting to pass it off as an ephemeral phenomenon that bore no theoretical weight, and if anything got in the way of a more insightful understanding of the challenges that face the mature democracies. My own view is that its disappearance is a sign of something more serious. While the formulations of the political elites that adhered to the “third way” were often laughably thin the underlying inspiration was much more important. While I could never prove this, and so this is in a blog and not in a paper, my perception is that there was a very strong connection between debates around Rawls and ideas of a radical centre. Not that all adherents to the radical centrist politics were Rawlsians, far from it, but the Rawlsian agenda set the terms for radical centrism. In the moment in which we find ourselves arguments organised around the view that collective action problems should, ideally, be solved by individuals following procedural norms are not right or wrong, but just irrelevant. Does anyone really believe that some kind of clever cap and trade system is really going to solve the global warming crisis? So the retreat of the radical centre is a sign of a retreat of a very important wing of liberalism. But given how important that nexus was to the cohesion of the liberal Atlantic this is a real problem.